​Trump never gave a sound explanation for withdrawing from the deal other than vague assertions that it was “the worst deal ever.” He has gone from a deal that some may consider flawed to no deal whatsoever. He has actually given little sign that he even knows what is in the accord. He did point out, correctly, that it did not restrict Iran’s other activities in the Middle East or prevent it from developing missiles. These things are true, but he has not explained how those things would be more acceptable if Iran had nuclear arms, too. These things were not included in the deal because to try to include them would have made the deal impossible to negotiate. The Trump administration has now included those subjects in its demands for a new deal with Iran, and in all likelihood, he will end up with nothing. Even Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, an Iranian dissident forced to live in exile, has denounced these demands as an affront to Iranian sovereignty.

What does Trump plan to replace the deal with? There are two theories on that. Many analysts assume that he does not really believe any acceptable deal can be negotiated with Iran, and what he seeks is to undermine and eventually overthrow the regime (perhaps because regime change has worked so well in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya). This is one of the few themes, by the way, that is capable of rallying all Iranian factions together. By all appearances, John Bolton, Trump’s new national security adviser, is a firm believer of this school. The other theory, the one publicly espoused by the administration, is that Iran can be brought to heel through unilaterally imposed U.S. sanctions. I recall a time, about a quarter century ago, when people asserted that once the Soviet Union had collapsed, unilateral U.S. sanctions would bring down the Cuban regime in short order.

Few people are aware of it, but about 15 years ago, when Mohammad Khatami was president of Iran, Iran ended its program to produce nuclear weapons and quietly offered the United States a deal with regard to its civilian nuclear program that was similar to the one Obama signed in 2015. (Incidentally, the Khatami administration had also been actively helpful behind the scenes with the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan.) In retrospect, we would have been better off accepting the deal at that time because it would have frozen the Iranian nuclear program at a much, much lower level of development. They didn’t have a single centrifuge then. The George W. Bush administration, however, was uninterested. The Bush administration decided that it didn’t have to negotiate a compromise diplomatic agreement; all it had to do was bring Iran to heel through sanctions. (Did I mention that in those days the under secretary of state for arms control was John Bolton?) But unilateral U.S. economic sanctions against Iran can have a limited effect, since the United States hasn’t traded with Iran since the late 1970s anyway. By 2015, Iran’s centrifuge supply had gone from 0 to 20,000 and was continuing to grow. (Although many find it counterintuitive, 20,000 centrifuges is about four times as many as you need to build a bomb; yet it is still not enough for a peaceful nuclear reactor fuel program, which calls for less highly enriched uranium but more of it.)​By the time Obama became president, the president of Iran was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was not particularly interested in negotiating. The Obama administration, however, made the sanctions more meaningful by taking the issue to the United Nations and bringing other countries into the sanctions regime, which he was able to do because of Ahmadinejad’s refusal to negotiate. Making the sanctions nearly universal got Iran’s attention. Sanctions, however, did not work their effect by changing Ahmadinejad’s mind about the value of negotiation. The change came about in 2013, when Iranians rejected Ahmadinejad’s preferred candidate for president and voted in Hassan Rouhani, who had been President Khatami’s national security adviser. He promptly offered essentially the same deal that Bush had ignored in 2003 (not to downplay the two years of negotiation that it took to finalize the deal).

Now, Trump has rejected the deal, undermined Rouhani domestically, and bolstered Iranian hard-liners who had always said you can’t trust the United States (and who are also the ones pushing the missile program and objectionable regional activities). In threatening to reimpose unilateral sanctions, Trump is returning to the Bush-era policy that failed to prevent Iran’s nuclear development in the first place. Since the Trump administration does understand that U.S. sanctions alone will not work, it is prepared to impose secondary sanctions as well. That is, the United States will punish companies, included those based in allied European countries, that trade with Iran by cutting them out of the U.S. market, imposing fines, and possibly arresting their executives. Separately, the administration revoked permission for Boeing and Airbus (which uses U.S.-made components) to sell airliners to Iran.

This is not going down well with Europeans, especially since it was the United States and not Iran that violated the agreement (and since the United States is also imposing tariffs on European steel purportedly because of Chineseoverproduction, demonstrating that it is not only the United States’ Iran policy that has become incoherent). The European Union is considering a rule forbidding European companies to comply with U.S. secondary sanctions and examining ways in which trade and investment could be conducted while avoiding U.S. banks. (Note that the heavy and arbitrary application of sanctions may eventually lead countries to innovate permanent alternatives to U.S. institutions in international economic affairs.) Even if this works out for Trump in the end, with European companies preferring to cut ties to Iran rather than risk their ties to the United States, the field will be left open to Russia, China, and possibly India, which have more companies unconnected to the U.S. market. Even in Europe, in the age of Trump, defying the United States is becoming increasingly popular with voters.

At the same time, all the JCPOA signatories other than the United States are meeting to see whether the agreement can be saved without U.S. participation. Success on their part could feasibly allow Trump to have his cake and eat it, too, if it allows Trump to look tough before his supporters without ending Iran’s participation in the agreement’s restrictions and verification program. Iran has basically challenged the Europeans to show how they can protect its interests despite active U.S. efforts to undermine them. Awaiting that, Iran has not yet definitively decided whether it will continue to adhere to the agreement’s provisions. Rouhani, with whom the agreement is closely identified in Iran, would certainly prefer to keep it if he can—and if he can survive politically. His position has already suffered from the fact that the agreement has not led to the kind of economic improvements he had anticipated (in part because of continuing sanctions that were not tied to the nuclear issue and in part because Iran’s economic problems also have domestic roots). Iran’s hard-liners, if they are sufficiently strengthened by Trump’s move, will be less forgiving of Trump and more likely to renew and perhaps even enhance the nuclear program.

Curiously, Trump did not do all that he could have done to undermine the agreement. At the UN Security Council, people expected the United States to invoke a JCPOA provision that would allow it to demand a vote to reaffirm the suspension of sanctions. The wording here is significant. The vote would be to reaffirm the suspension of sanctions. If it were a vote toreimpose sanctions, then any permanent member could veto it and sanctions would remain suspended. Since the vote would be to reaffirm the suspension of sanctions, the United States could veto it and the sanctions would go back into effect. The Trump administration, however, simply chose to ignore the UN and rely on its unilaterally imposed secondary sanctions to keep others from dealing with Iran. Thus the UN suspension of sanctions remains in effect. This may reflect Bolton’s thinking, since he famously despises the UN (and Europeans for that matter), or it may simply be another example of what Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution called “malevolence mitigated by incompetence” when describing a different Trump policy.

P.S., No, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu did not prove that Iran had violated the JCPOA when he revealed secret Iranian documents in late April. Those pertained to the program that Iran shut down in 2003. The IAEA already knew about it, at least in outline, despite Iran’s denials. Because of these documents, we will know more about it, which is a good thing, and we can be grateful to Israeli intelligence for that. Nevertheless, it is in no sense a reason to abandon the Iran deal. If anything, evidence that Iran was concealing details is all the more reason to keep the IAEA verification regime in place. Scott C. Monje